Pakistan Draws a Line on Hunt for Bin Laden

The government of Pakistan said Wednesday it was confident that Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar were not in the country, and it would not allow U.S. troops to look for them here.

Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider said in an interview that Pakistan had good control of its border with Afghanistan and good cooperation with the semiautonomous tribesmen living there.

As a result, neither Bin Laden, blamed by Washington for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, nor Omar, his former Afghan host, could have found refuge in Pakistan, he said, rebutting suggestions that U.S. troops might need to cross into Pakistan to look for them or their supporters.

“The Pakistani tribesmen living on this side of the Pakistan-Afghan border are very clear. They are cooperating with us, and they are acting in a very responsible manner. They will not like to take the risk of harboring anybody, not at all.”

Pakistan, a key partner in the U.S.-led war on terrorism in neighboring Afghanistan, has fanned out troops along its long western border, which winds through rugged mountains, to keep out fighters from Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network and the toppled Taliban regime.

“After 22 long years, we have very effective control of our western border,” Haider said, adding that the army had established 300 checkpoints in the region.

“So we are very confident on this issue, and I don’t think they [Bin Laden or Omar] can find a refuge here.”

On Tuesday, two U.S. senators visiting troops in Afghanistan said some Al Qaeda fighters had fled to Pakistan and raised the possibility of putting U.S. forces on the border to block others.

One of them, Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters, “I am hoping that the government of Pakistan is going to join us in a big way to rid the border of . . . the Al Qaeda who would use Pakistan as a sanctuary.”

Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan said the United States had not asked to deploy troops on the Pakistani side of the border to prevent such escapes.

“Neither they have requested nor will we allow this,” Khan said.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf “has already said . . . there is no need for any forces to cross over,” Haider said. “We are quite well organized, we are quite effective, we are our watch, on high alert.”

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters in Washington on Monday that he had no plans to send U.S. troops across the Afghan border into Pakistan.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a daily briefing Wednesday: “We’re cooperating very closely. I’m sure, should any particular situation arise, we would be able to resolve it and maintain security together with the government of Pakistan.”

But he added, “I’m sure the military people and perhaps others have had some discussion, but . . . the confidence that we have that any particular situation would be dealt with appropriately, I think, has not yet really been tested.”

Pakistani troops are believed to have captured hundreds of suspected Al Qaeda members fleeing U.S. airstrikes on the Tora Bora region in Afghanistan in December.

Haider said they had rounded up hundreds of Pakistanis who had been fighting alongside the Taliban and had fled home.

“Each one now is being thoroughly investigated,” he said.